What’s New in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

There are many long-awaited features and technologies built in to Hyper-V that provide Microsoft the ability to compete with other server virtualization products on the market. Some of the key additions to Hyper-V include the following:

. Live Migration—Live Migration is the number-one most-requested feature by customers. Live Migration enables administrators to migrate highly available Hyper-V guests between clustered hosts with nearly zero downtime.

. Support for up to eight physical processors—Windows 2008 Server R2 virtualization provides the capability to have up to eight physical processors—twice the number of physical processors supported by Hyper-V V1 in Windows Server 2008. Note that this refers to physical sockets, not cores.

. Support for up to 64 logical cores per guest session—Windows Server 2008 R2 virtualization provides the capability to have up to 64 logical processors (cores) allocated to a single guest session—four times better than in Windows Server 2008.

. Support for greater physical host memory—Windows Server 2008 R2 virtualization supports up to 1TB physical memory allocation per host—a huge increase from the 32GB supported in Windows Server 2008.

. Support for greater virtual guest memory—Virtual guests can now access up to 64GB per VM. This is a huge scalability improvement from Windows Server 2008, where VMs were limited to 32GB total RAM per host.

Although Hyper-V provides the capability to host guest operating systems for Windows servers, client systems, and non-Windows systems, many of the tools enterprises use in virtual server environments require the addition of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) tool.

VMM provides a more centralized view and administration of multiple virtual guest sessions, the tools to do physical-to-virtual image creation, virtual-to-virtual image copying, and load balancing of virtual images across VMM servers. VMM adds the administrative tools that take the basic virtual server sessions, and provides administrators the ability to better manage the guest sessions.

Source of Information : Sams - Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed